Turning weaknesses into strengths is one of the most asked questions. This is because you can’t find an entrepreneur without some weakness. Even the most successful entrepreneurs in the world have them.
In my experience, I didn’t know an entrepreneur without some weaknesses. I can say that I find successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs depending on how they turn or complement their weak sides. There are no supermen entrepreneurs who can manage their businesses without weaknesses.
Today, it’s not about the question, do you have or do not have weaknesses? It is more about recognizing them and what you do to decrease their effect on your business success. You can always work on your strengths and eliminate the weak sides by delegating tasks.
Often, your weaknesses aren’t visible to you. But they are visible for your company, and it will start struggling. So, your business struggles because of you as a reason.
What do you think about yourself? Do you have some entrepreneurial weaknesses? Or are you the only one who is without them?
Here, I want to share six things you can do when you want to turn your most significant weak sides into strengths.
Common Entrepreneur Weaknesses
Before you can work on turning weakness into strength, you first need to identify what they are.
You can say that you don’t have entrepreneurial weaknesses. But, it is not true. I have never seen an entrepreneur, and even the most successful ones I know, without some weakness. And this is especially true for new small business owners.
So, I think that all business entrepreneurs have one or more weak sides. Because of that, I want to cover an example list of the most important weak sides related to your entrepreneurial career.
1. Fear of Failure
This is probably the biggest one and must be at the beginning of the list. Fear of failure is one of the most common entrepreneur weaknesses, and I am sure many entrepreneurs struggle because of fear.
The fear of failing can paralyze your decision-making. Entrepreneurs may struggle to take risks that are essential to business success.
2. Self-discipline
If you are disciplined, motivated to do things you set out to do, not procrastinate, and control your behavior, then you are self-disciplined. In this situation, your self-discipline can be your strength. But if your behavior is not as described above, then your self-discipline can be your weakness.
Here are helpful tips to help you decide how often you must check your to-do list. Also, use the following five techniques to beat procrastination.
3. Problem-solving
Problem solving is one of the most common entrepreneur weaknesses even this is one of the biggest postulates of a successful business.
If you are an analytical person with exceptional ability to identify and define problems, analyze them, find causes and the right solutions, and implement the best solutions, then problem-solving is your strength.
Otherwise, problem-solving can be your weakness.
4. Teamwork and Managing Teams
Probably you know that you need to work in teams. So, you must efficiently communicate with your team members, encourage, listen to, and respect them, and contribute significantly to team goals. Ifr you are great with these then the teamwork is your strength.
Many entrepreneurs, especially startup entrepreneurs lacking management and leadership skills. This is one of the most common entrepreneur weaknesses.
Otherwise, teamwork can be your weakness, and you must do something to improve your management and leadership skills to overcome this weak side of yourself.
Use the following seven-step framework if you want to achieve all your business goals.
5. Taking Initiatives
Suppose you are a person who continuously has ideas to do something to improve your company and takes all necessary steps to make it possible. In that case, having such a diverse portfolio of ideas, taking the initiative to implement all their ideas is entrepreneurial strength.
Otherwise, taking the initiative can be your weakness as an entrepreneur if you do not act on your ideas.
I have seen many entrepreneurs who are proud and excited about of all their ideas but after several months the whole excitement is gone. You cannot succeed as an entrepreneur without taking the initiative to do something.
You need to escape your entrepreneurial inertia if you want to succeed. Here are ten ideas to beat your entrepreneurial inertia.
6. Persistence and patience
As an entrepreneur, you probably already know that the results will not come today, but you must be persistent and patient. Why? Because if you give up too early, you will not achieve success.
Remember, successful entrepreneurs are not quitters. They are persistent and patient, and sometimes it will last for years. Also, not every business can achieve quick success. The success requires too much invested time, competences, efforts and money.
7. Perfectionism
I have seen many new small business owners struggle with perfectionism. They not take action, but only try to make their product or service perfect, their business plan, branding activities, etc. But, time goes on and in many cases some other small business with entrepreneur that is not perfectionist will start doing things.
Perfectionism can become one of your biggest constraints as an entrepreneur because you have such a diverse portfolio of tasks, and it will be very difficult for you to move forward if you are a perfectionist. Perfectionism is not allowed in your own business because you must do the things, not postpone them because they are not perfect enough.
Every item on your to-do list must be done on time and with acceptable quality. But you may ask what acceptable quality is. It is the level of quality that is acceptable for your bosses, like customers, stakeholders, partners, etc.
8. Being Alone on Your Entrepreneurial Journey
You must understand that you are not alone on your entrepreneurial journey.
Independence is part of entrepreneurship, but refusing to seek help or delegate can limit your business potential. It doesn’t matter if you hire business consultant, or search for marketing advice, or you expand your team members, remember that you can not and will not do everything by yourself.
9. Struggling with Financial Management
I know that not every business owner has a fluency in financial management. Also, I know many new small business owners that don’t have financial skills, and what is worse they don’t try to understand and learn something related to finances to manage their businesses successfully.
From underestimating costs to managing cash flow, financial mismanagement can quickly separate successful from unsuccessful small businesses.
10. Ignoring Marketing and Sales
You may have the best product or service, but without effective marketing, it can go unrecognized by those who need it most. On the other hand, if you have the best product, marketing, and branding strategy in place and don’t know how to sell your products and services, your marketing and branding efforts will be for nothing.
So, if your marketing skills are weak side of you, don’t hesitate marketing advice from experts. The same is true for sales.
Every entrepreneur confronts their own version of these challenges at some point or another. Also, other factors will impact your weak or strong sides. What is important is to acknowledge them and try to do something.
How do You Turn Weaknesses into Strengths and Become a Successful Entrepreneur?
Let’s take a look at the step-by-step approach you can conduct here:
1. Create Your Most Important Strengths and Weaknesses List as Entrepreneur
You are an entrepreneur and must be honest about your and your business’s weak sides.
What can you get if you cheat yourself? What can you get if you cheat your customers or potential customers?
You are losing your own game on your ground when you cheat yourself and your customers. You are losing possibilities to improve yourself and your business. This means you are losing the possibility of making yourself as an entrepreneur and your business much stronger than they are now.
Because of that, the first step for you is to be honest with yourself.
One way entrepreneurs can identify their strengths is to take a strengths test, a handy tool to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. Recognizing your strengths can be challenging as they often remain invisible to you. Yet, they become glaringly apparent to your company, leading to their struggle and ultimately attributing the business’s difficulties to you.
Also, you can begin with a personal SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). to define your weak and strong sides
These questions will help you in defining your biggest weaknesses:
- What are my known weak sides?
- What are my hidden weaknesses?
- What will be my weak sides in the future?
Before you start working on turning your weaknesses into strengths, you need to know some things. First is what can be an entrepreneurial weakness, and second, what can be an entrepreneurial strength.
2. Recognize and Learn About Your Weaknesses and Strengths Related to Your Small Business
If you know about your weaknesses, don’t ignore them. Try to fix them and turn them into your strength. Eliminate all of your hidden weaknesses and prepare for what is possible in the future.
It is the similar process like when you try to make your strengths even stronger.
The most important question is recognizing your most essential weak sides and strengths. Regarding your entrepreneurial activities, you will always want to do something. This is something often the accomplishment of your goals. Because of that, when I want to recognize the biggest weakness of an entrepreneur, my starting point is their goal accomplishment.
Here are some questions that can lead you through this discovery process of your weak sides and strengths:
- What have I accomplished related to my goals in the last several years? Why have I accomplished what I want to accomplish?
- What are the strengths that allow me to achieve my goals? How can I use them in the future?
- What are my most significant weaknesses that don’t allow my business to succeed?
- What strengths do I need and still don’t have to help my business succeed in the market?
- How do other people respond to such weak sides? Can I use some of their strategies?
- What can be my unique strategy to beat my most significant shortcomings as an entrepreneur?
3. Prioritize Your Weaknesses
You don’t need to transform all your weak sides into strengths. This is impossible or sometimes will not bring you value for your entrepreneurial work.
Why?
The simple answer is that your business is created on your most significant strengths at a specific time. You can not be an expert in everything. You need to find the most critical drawbacks that limit the growth of your business and find appropriate ways to remove them or delegate them to another more competent person for the specific task.
So, when you finish defining all your weaknesses, start prioritizing them. Make a list from the highest possible priority to the lowest possible priority. You can use Excel or some spreadsheet application to help you complete these steps.
4. Write an Entrepreneur’s Journal Each Day
One strategy that can help you recognize and turn your weak sides into strengths is to use an entrepreneur’s journal. Your daily diary will help you learn about yourself, your mistakes, and your failures. In such a way, you will become a stronger entrepreneur.
An entrepreneur’s journal is where you will spend 30 minutes daily writing about your daily experiences and successes from one side and your most significant struggles and failures from another side.
Give yourself a chance to journal daily, and you will see the progress on your entrepreneurial journey.
5. Accept That You Have Weak Sides and Work Hard to Turn Them into Strengths
When you already have a list of weaknesses that prevent you from accomplishing your goals, the most important thing you must ensure is that you accept that everything on the list is your weakness.
- How can I turn my known and hidden weaknesses into my most significant strengths?
- How can I prepare for possible future weaknesses?
- How can I show my progress to my current and potential customers?
I have often seen entrepreneurs who know they have some weak sides but ignore them because they can’t accept them. It is not the problem to live with weak sides, the bigger problem is that you don’t do anything to support your business growth.
For example, if you are a startup entrepreneur, you can not expect that your business will be based only on your strengths because as I already have mentioned there is not a person on the planet as supermen without weak sides. So, if you do not take some steps to cover your weak side, your startup will suffer. But, if you have a mentor behind you, you will overcome all possible challenges on your entrepreneurial journey.
6. Commit Yourself to Turn Your Weaknesses Into Strengths
You must commit yourself to turning your weak sides into strengths.
One possible solution for your total commitment is to go one step further and publicly show where you are weak and what you plan to do. In such a way, you can build trust in the customer’s eyes about you as an entrepreneur.
The best way is to build your strengths through practice and experience and then transfer that experience to new situations. Here’s an example: if you’re not a natural at public speaking, commit yourself to speaking in front of groups at least once a week. When you practice regularly, you’ll become better.
But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that there are a lot of strengths to build on. You can improve your communication skills and be more creative. You can become more confident and more organized. These are the strengths you can build on.
In short, it’s about looking at your problems and asking yourself, “What if I could turn this into a strength?” It means you must see the problem and ask yourself what you can do about it instead of simply accepting whatever happens.
So, share what you think is your weak side on social media and what you will take regarding this. Then, work on your promises.
3 Strategies for Transformation
1. Continuous Learning
The first and most important strategy that I highly encourage you to take is continuous learning. Never stop learning. Whether through industry publications, online courses, observation of your work environment, or simply asking questions, each new piece of knowledge is a foundation in your business’s strength.
2. Strategic Partnerships and Mentorships
As I have already mentioned you always have options to bridge the gap because your own weaknesses. You don’t need always to make them your strengths. But, you must always identify your weaknesses and seek out partnerships with those who excel where you fall short.
For example, a mentor can provide invaluable guidance, sharing lessons from their own successes and failures so you can see your roadmap straight away. You can always get marketing advice from marketing experts.
Remember that not everyone can be the best in everything.
3. New Skills Development
As an entrepreneur you can not say that you have a degree and your don’t need fresh skills. Remember that the world and also your business environment evolve over time. Most jobs existing today will not exist in the future. Your past competences will not be appropriate today, or in the future. So, I highly encourage you to be adaptable to what the future will bring to all of us if you want to succeed.
If you find financial management as your constraint, invest in training for you or your employees. Professionals make bookkeeping look easy, but it’s a learned skill like any other.
Turning Weakness Into Strength Examples
Here, I would like to share three examples from my experience.
Poor Communication Skills
I have worked with an entrepreneur with poor communication skills who struggles to build strong business relationships with his partners, suppliers, and customers. This was one major weakness so he always try to avoid networking events. And, as you know, networking is important for business success. Because of this major weakness his business start to experience struggling because of limited growing.
However, while working on many other things inside his business, we have also covered this issue. He started actively working on his communication skills through practice and seeking feedback from others. He started to visit almost all local events even in one case to be keynote speaker even until then he was not a public speaker. I know that this was not easy for him, but the fear as one of the reasons for poor communication skills have disappeared and he become more confident in communication with other people. But the most challenging part was going outside his comfort zone and networking with others.
Poor Organizational Skills
The second example concerns a disorganized business owner who may have struggled to track important tasks and deadlines.
When I looked at his to-do list, it was really scary. Hundreds of tasks without context related to time, place, or importance of the tasks.
The improvement process started with prioritization or next week’s biggest priority. Then we have worked on management skills and especially delegating tasks for some of his team members who can be reliable and competent. Also, we hired a virtual assistant for some trivial tasks that took almost half his everyday tasks.
So, improving his organizational skills, and implementing some time management principles by delegation and hiring virtual assistant, slowly week by week and month by month we’ve seen the rise in his own performance. But, not only that, in the same time we have seen how his business’ KPIs start to grow.
Remember that if your performance as an entrepreneur is low, your company will suffer. So, you must start with yourself and then continue with your company.
Lack of Self-Confidence
Another example I want to share is related to the lack of confidence. One of my clients lacks confidence and, because of that, struggles to take necessary steps for the business. He succeeded at the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey because of his new idea. Still, later he was not confident to work on the business growth because of lack of confidence that he can manage such a growth.
The reason behind this weakness was fear of failure coming from too many questions starting with what if… These questions are important but can sometimes paralyze anyone thats fearing failure. It is because we often cannot see the future of business.
So, it was really challenging for me to find the right solution. We have started with building new skills. Firt, analytical and risk management skills. Why? Because I wanted to show him that if he become more analytical and calculate risks related to his decisions he will not fear from failure and will start making informed decisions with much higher confidence. And I was right. He quickly became able to see the right roadmap straight away and make the right decisions.
Conclusion
It’s time to step into the ring, leveraging your weak sides not as weights that hold you down but as possibilities from which you push yourself higher on your entrepreneurial journey. It’s a search that always starts with self-awareness and ends with sustained and remarkable entrepreneurial growth.
Begin now, and see just how strong you can become. Remember, the strength of a business often lies not in the absence of weaknesses but in the wisdom to turn them into assets.
